Waste disposal is often present in the BBT web-page, not surprising really considering the fact that the figures for recycling plastic in Bizkaia (and Spain in general) are ridiculously low compared to other parts of Europe. Naturally, everyone has to do their part firstly by reducing their use of plastic and ensuring that they have a bag when they do their shopping. But it is hard to avoid plastic packaging and hopefully the new Spanish law on plastic packaging that is being prepared will help to decrease its use. Thanks to a European Directive of the 21st July, 2021 one-use plastics such as plastic plates have been banned in Europe and the idea is that by 2025 %25 of all plastic should be recycled and %30 by 2030. As for plastic bottles, %90 of them will have to be phased out by 2030. The best way of recycling plastic bottles and cans is the Deposit Return Scheme which already exists in many European countries but it is a scheme which in Spain is opposed by the big drink companies which use a lot of plastic. The biggest company and the biggest plastic polluter world-wide is Coca-Cola. As Greenpeace reminds us in this article the use of plastic is responsible for continued fossil fuel extraction at a time of climate emergency, another good reason for reducing its use and recycling it as much as possible.
Next year Scotland will be the next country to adopt the Deposit Return System and at first Coca Cola resisted and has now said it will support the new DRS system. This is great news and the question is, why Scotland and not here? Well, the answer is that, unlike here, in Scotland the government is behind the project whereas here the Ecoembes yellow container model has the full support of companies like Coca Cola and except in some places such as Navarra where there have been various experiments on using the DRS system. However, it seems that things could be changing here thanks to the previously mentioned draft Royal Decree on Packaging and Packaging Waste the way will be open for the introduction of a DRS system here.
In Bizkaia Garbiker is responsible for the yellow containers which collect our plastic. Recently they replaced most of their containers with new ones with two holes and in some lucky places there are bins which you can fully open to make it easy to dispose of the plastic. As you can imagine it`s much easier just to put all your rubbish together in the grey bin, particularly for places like schools which generate loads of plastic rubbish. Why haven’t they been given one of the yellow bins which can be easily used? We know of one school which had to insist but eventually got one. But why didn’t they provide all schools with this type of container? Surely any company that was interested in getting as much plastic as possible recycled would go out of their way to make it easy for you to do that. After getting in contact with Garbiker they have told us that any school that asked for the easy to open container-bin, got one. The problem is that we don`t think any school was informed of that possibility. As for what they did with the old container-bins, more than a year later they are still trying to decide what to do with them, hardly a good example for the circular economy.
If you are interested in reading more on why the yellow containers are not the solution then there is no better reading than Alberto Vizcaino`s excellent book Contenedor Amarillo S.A., a copy of which can be borrowed from BBT. To get an idea of what it is about you can read the following interview with him. As Alberto says, the system of yellow containers ensures that the big companies are freed of any real responsibility of recycling with the result that only one quarter of all plastic is recycled, far from what is required by the EU. The only way that we can ensure higher levels of plastic recycling is by using the DRS system so why don`t we follow the example of Scotland and end the failed yellow container system?
